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The Government is Attacking Our Countryside - Sebastian Morello, Huntsman & Writer
00:40:06
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- [00:01]
A
Either Britain rediscovers itself as a disciple of the Lord, or it will be handed over to those who have a much stronger, much more vigorous worldview than one that Paddington Bear can provide. And there's quite a lot of evidence suggests that in our case, that will be Islam.
- [00:33]
B
Welcome to the New Culture Forum. My name is Nina Power and I'm joined for another conversation by Sebastian Morello. So, Sebastian, you are an associate professor of philosophy, you're a writer, you're a father, and you're a hunter. We have some of your books here, Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries, amongst others. And your most recent book is Woodland Philosophy. So I'm going to begin by talking about a recent viral video, which I know you've seen, where a visibly non. Native British person, man, is in the countryside and there's footage of him basically destroying a dry stone wall. Just. He's taken all the bricks out and just standing there and the person filming is saying, you know, what on earth are you doing? Right, you can't destroy this. This. This. This has been here for hundreds of years. And I think this is sort of. We see a kind of war on the countryside, basically from all directions, right? From people who are not n. Also from kind of Starmer's government attacking the farmers through all kinds of taxation, the desire to build on the green belt and so on. So I'm just wondering if you'd say a little bit about this. What's happening to the countryside? Like, you know, this kind of attack on the countryside from all directions, as you say it.
- [01:57]
A
Yes. Well, it does seem to be a situation of death by a thousand cuts, obviously, whatever the merits or demerits of Brexit, one thing that did happen as a consequence of Brexit is that the farmers lost their EU subsidies, which put them in a very economically challenging situation. And there were repeated promises by the Tory government at the time, by this government, and these promises have been watered down as time has gone on to somehow compensate for that, and that's never come. So farmers are in a very challenging situation, so they're told to do all sorts of things. The popular buzzword at the moment is to diversify. They must diversify and open farm shops and cafes and build yurts on their land for Airbnb and all sorts of things to make their land something that can be marketed again. And, and then, of course, when they do that, they suddenly have to wade through vast amounts of bureaucratic syrup. And it's. It, it's. It's a very, very difficult situation now, obviously, I'm not a farmer. I live in the countryside. I live in a very strange, very sort of wild part of, of England. But I, I'm not myself a farmer nor do I come from a farming family. So I'm very reluctant to speak on behalf of farmers. But I was master of hounds for a pack of foot hounds until I moved to the place I live now and, and in that role where we were constantly opening up new land for trail hunting and having to spend a great deal of time with farmers and landowners, I came to understand better their challenges. And it's a very difficult situation certainly with this new government. Since labor has come into power, it's been astonishing for me to watch how labor has looked at all the various relations and all the various institutions and settled ways of living that hold this widely dispersed community together and is constantly chipping away at it. So you mentioned the proposal to build across the green belt. There's a huge amount of pressure on farmers to give up their land for new build properties. And of course people have to ask why do we need a vast number of new build areas when we're in a demographic crisis in England? So one can reasonably suspect that these properties are not for people who have. How would you put an ancestral claim to this country? And that's going to dramatically change the culture of the countryside. And it seems to me that that's probably part of the plan because there is a widespread feeling in Westminster that there is something about our settled agrestic rural culture that is sort of exclusionary for this new people of nowhere. And so somehow we have to constantly chip away at it. And so you have situation but you also have the proposal to change the drink driving limits which will immediately make life extremely challenging for rural pubs. So people won't be able to drive to them and have their couple of pints or pint and a half or whatever. So rural people won't be able to congregate. You obviously have the ban on trail hunting, which is a rural sport. That's very close to my own heart for obvious reasons. The proposal is to limit the quarry species for game shooters and wildfowlers, who particularly wildfowlers, but game shooters as well have been absolutely at the forefront of conservation efforts in this country and are really the unsung heroes of wild Britain, I think. And then you know, the suggestion that Section 1 and Section 2 firearms be merged, which will make it almost impossible or not impossible, that's over egging it, but will make it much more challenging for people to acquire shotguns and get involved in the shooting industry. And once the land that is kept aside for habitat preservation, for sporting activities, once that can no longer pay its way, then all of that land, the habitats will be destroyed, it will be turned over to solar panels and new houses. And so there are, I mean, I've just named a few, which is already pretty comprehensive, I think, you know, just a few of the challenges that the countryside is facing. And, and so then, you know, as somebody who, who I suppose is this way inclined because of my philosophical training, the question that I keep coming back to is why? Why is this all happening, right?
- [07:52]
B
I mean, if we think about it as a war on the countryside, right, which includes everybody who lives and works there, the farmers, the hunters. I mean, I grew up in the countryside myself, I grew up in Wiltshi. Is a strong sense in which the countryside as such is perceived as the enemy, right? I mean, we've seen various initiatives in recent months. Oh, the countryside is too white. You know, you're talking about diversification in the sort of economic sense. But there's also this campaign to sort of somehow say, well, it's not okay to have white people in their villages or if people enjoy rambling or visiting castles and keeps and nature reserves, that there's something wrong with that, right? There's something wrong with people enjoying and wanting to conserve and, and to sort of live and work in the countryside. And obviously we've seen various farmers protests come up to Westminster and so on. All these points they're making about how inheritance tax and other taxes is basically ruining the possibility of sustaining particularly small farms, you know, not being able to pass on to their children and so on. Again, this attack on kind of tradition and ancestry and people who know how to manage the land, right. And it is complicated. It's a complex ecology really. All of these different groups working together and yeah, I think the sort of spreadsheet, people just look at the map and say, well, oh, it's all empty and nothing's happening there and the people who live there are probably right wing anyway, so we hate them.
- [09:25]
A
And there's some truth to that insofar as people in the countryside do tend to intuitively have more conservative views, they tend to be suspicious of inordinate, inordinately abstractionist, top down ways of governing and arranging things. They think that most ways by which you solve problems is through negotiation and conversation and getting on with the person who lives down the road from you. And say the countryside does largely function by these very, very deep relationships and connections. That are established over centuries. And this is really, I think, one of the ways that the countryside, and if you like to use an overused term, the blob, right, or whatever, that where this conflict arises, that they conceive of reality differently, right. There is a certain ideological, technocratic way of thinking which doesn't see reality as historically conditioned, as built through relations, as not necessarily rational, not irrational, but simply through pieties and affections. And going back to that video that you mentioned right at the beginning, you might say at least an argument could be made that the young man of swarthy complexion who was sort of attacking this ancient wall somewhere in rural England was kind of doing something rational, right? He had seen that there's a great load of unused pasture, probably there wasn't livestock there. It wasn't. It clearly wasn't arable land either. And he had to walk another, whatever it was, five, ten minutes to find the footpath rather than just plowing through this wall. And so he was doing something, you could argue, deeply rational and maybe that from which other people might benefit as well. But the fact is, what he didn't have, and the man who took exception to what he was doing and filmed him certainly clearly did have, was a deep piety and affection for the history and the landscape. And this place that hasn't only been shaped by our ancestors, but that shaped our ancestors and made us the people that we are. And that way of thinking, that way of talking is very, very alien to the modern politician. I mean, you have to remember that in this country, the rise of the politician is itself a kind of strange thing, right? I mean, what we used to have was a monarchy that was an icon of our devotion. And when we made a decision to go and die on some foreign field, we would say, for king and country, there was this kind of icon of the. And whatever one thinks of the kind of post 1688 settlement, nonetheless, that magic of the monarchy persisted. And then you had the lords temporal and spiritual again. That labor has now taken a sledgehammer to that institution as well. But then you had the lower chamber. And they weren't thought of primarily as politicians. They were thought of as statesmen. And what the term statesman connotes and what the term politician connotes are actually quite different. The statesman was somebody who didn't necessarily have the accurate, perfectly refined technique. He hadn't gone off and got his PPE degree and could go and now run the machine. A statesman was somebody who had gone through an incremental process of initiation into these kind of Habitual, prudential ways of managing what wasn't a machine at all, which was a living organism, a corporate person. Now, insofar as that idea of the human community still exists, it exists largely in rural England. And so it's always going to come into conflict with this new species of human being called the politician, which, you know, I'm, I'm deeply suspicious of everything that word both denotes and connotes in, in modernity, because at least insofar as we have a conception of the politician, it's not the Aristotelian conception of, of the one who can identify the good of the polis and move the community towards that good. That's, that's not what we mean.
- [14:44]
B
Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any concern for the good amongst our technocratic overlords. Right. It's all spreadsheets and efficiency and quantification and numbers and this very modern way of looking at things. I mean, I was reflecting earlier about the question of culture. I mean, obviously we're on the New Culture forum and thinking about the way in which the word culture itself, which is originally kind of an agricultural term, has become this artificial idea. Well, culture is something that men make or it's art, therefore it's not real. You know, it doesn't have a connection necessarily with a people in a place. And, but culture in its real true meaning is precisely the relationship between a people and a place and it's kind of creative unfolding in nature. And I know you've written a lot about the Christian tradition and Christendom and Catholicism in particular, but particularly reflecting on its relationship to kind of nature and kind of what people call re. Enchantment and a kind of more magical understanding of what nature is, the role it plays in thinking about Christianity and I mean, Britain is a Christian country, would you say, do you think?
- [15:58]
A
It depends what you mean by the word is, to quote Jordan Peterson, the, the, you know, Britain or, or at least England is a confessional state insofar as it has a, A, A, a church and a religion by law established and its monarch is obviously the head of that church. And so, and that comes down to us from the tradition of what we once thought of as discipled nations. So obviously in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 28, verse 19, you have Jesus Christ's great commission, where he tells his disciples to go and make disciples not of individuals, but of the nations. The ethnoi. And nation is a very interesting word. You know, it obviously has etymological connections to Natal. It's a people who are born together as a single family. And those people together become a disciple. And so what you got, what I suppose what Christendom is, is a collection of nations that are in fraternal relationship one another because they've all become disciples of. Of one Lord. Right? Now, the reason why we have a confessional state is because England's, England traditionally identified itself with that tradition. What the condition is. Now, it is very, very difficult to say. But I mean, I'm quite sort of radical on this, on this topic. I'm. I'm what, you know, I suppose what people identify as post liberal or integralist or what, whatever you want to say. I prefer the, the word. I'm a cons. I'm, I'm a. I'm. I'm a Christendom traditionalist, basically, you know. And I don't think that in a confessional state somebody who is an atheist or a nihilist or a materialist reductionist really has any business trying to represent in a seat of power a confessional state. And it wasn't that long ago in this country where if you weren't a communicant member of the established church, you know, there were all sorts of officers that you were cut off from. You know, you could, you couldn't be a military officer or you couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge or Durham. There are all sorts of things you couldn't do. Now that is the kind of residue of a. Of a country that still believes in its discipled identity. The question for me is whether the nation has now found itself in such a colossal state of deterioration and decadence that people realize, and there are some signs that this is happening. People begin to realize that actually without that animating, vivifying inspiration of, of its own reception of Christianity, it can't survive because actually between, between. Between seeing all of reality as emanating from and participating on, participating in God's own life and the way in which God discloses himself in history. Between that and nihilism, there isn't really anything this. You can, you can kind of. You can get by on sentimentalism for a couple of generations, you know, and you can talk a lot about, I don't know, wasn't Churchill great or wasn't the Empire great or, you know, anything else that you want to kind of try and link our national identity to, you know, now, I guess it's Paddington Bear or something, you know, so we're constantly, desperately searching around for. Last thing that we can say, oh, that's. That's what Britain really is.
- [20:33]
B
Harry Potter.
- [20:33]
A
Yeah, or Harry Potter. But actually that's, that's not going to outlive a generation, maybe two really either either Britain rediscovers itself as a disciple of the Lord or it will be handed over to those who have a much stronger, much more vigorous worldview than one that Paddington Bear can provide. And there's quite a lot of evidence suggests that in our case, that will be Islam.
- [21:18]
B
Yes, I mean, we are at a kind of crossroads, it seems to me, in many ways. And I do think that we do see these resurgences, these green shoots, this of remembering of who we are. I think that we've been compelled to forget or to feel awful. Right. Oh, you're British or you're English. Oh, this is bad. You know, you're responsible for everything bad in history. And this kind of thing, it's, it's basically a form of propaganda and sort of self undermining of an entire people. Obviously we have seen a sense in which people are more and more alive to this, both the propaganda campaign and the desire to preserve and protect what is left of our culture. And I do think that a lot remains, right. Everything we have is still here, all the history, all the heritage, all the nature, despite the best efforts of the spreadsheet people to kind of parcel it up and rationalize it and destroy it and fill it with people who want to knock down dry stone walls. So I mean, I think we're getting back to an understanding of culture and of our Christian herit. But I, I agree we've been running on fumes for generations at this point, you know, with every generation becoming in a way more liberal, less tied to the land, you know, just refusing that. But it's always struck me, or increasingly struck me that it's the conservatives who want to preserve nature the most. I mean, we have a, a crazy Green Party, we have who, when they talk about the environment, which is not very often because they're either talking about Gaza or something, but nominally they're supposed about nature and the environment and so on, but they don't seem to have any genuine love or understanding of it whatsoever. So you have all these kind of fantasy parties, all these things purporting to speak on behalf of nature, but don't in any way have a genuine connection to the land at all. In fact, they kind of seem to.
- [23:16]
A
They can't name the trees, they can't, they don't understand what a habitat is and how it's preserved. No, you're absolutely right. I Mean, you use the term nature and the environment synonymously, right?
- [23:33]
B
I much prefer the term nature, but you know, the greens would talk about the environment, I think.
- [23:37]
A
Yeah, and I think that's very, I think that linguistic choice, the shift in idioms there tells us a lot. You know, the environment, that's a francophone word that means the stuff with which we're surrounded. Nature means something very different. Nature is, you know, you and I have a nature, and by having a nature, we are contiguous with the rest of nature. So whenever we talk about the natural world, we're including ourselves in the natural world. And we, and we see the flourishing of the natural world as our own flourishing. And we see our relationship with the natural world, whether that's a steward or as omnivore or predator or whatever it is. We are constantly living in symbiosis with the natural world with which we're contiguous and co. Extensive. The environment is a very different term. It's the word itself implies that we are something set apart. And here's this mass, this great resource, and our job is, in this kind of Baconian way, to dominate it. And we can dominate it, yes, in a benign way by, I don't know, some grandiose rewilding project, or we can dominate it in a more aggressive way with our fracking ventures or whatever it is, but in the end it's stuff and we're not part of it. That's what the word environment. And it's. And I think it's, I think, I think it tells us a lot that those of a particular political tradition will opt for one word over the other. And, and yes, I, I think more conservative minded people have a preference for nature. And I think, by the way, we've only got a little window available to us before we lose the word. I think already nature is considered to be a very dangerous word when you talk about human nature. Human nature implies that human nature might have a telos and there are all kinds of ways of living that might be completely unacceptable and damaging to human nature. And therefore you're opening the door to being able to judge people and judge certain lifestyles and judge certain behaviors and all sorts of things that you can't only understand human life and human activity in terms of, you know, the self realizing, authentic self going through that sort of wonderful journey of self discovery. That's not what the term nature implies. And so already it's considered a kind of very, very dangerous term. And yet in the common mind, as it were, it's still sufficiently respected that you know, marketing companies want to talk about their all natural yogurt or they're all natural, you know, cotton or whatever it is, because they know that it has these connotations in, in people's minds. We've got this little window before it just becomes anathema to recover nature, to retrieve it. So a lot of the work that I'm doing in ecological ethics and so on is really to try and not do something new, but to recover our ancestral conception of the cosmos. So, yeah, I mean, I've heard you say before, Nina, that, that it's. When you talk about our country and our land and so forth, you say it's all still there. It's all still there. And I have heard you say this on a number of occasions, and every time I hear you say it, I do think to myself, is that true? Because I really do think that you, you remember that, that famous passage in the Decline and Fall of. Is it decline, Fall of the West? The, the Spengler's book. Yes, the. The Decline of the West. The Decline of the West, Yes. I'm getting mixed up with Gibbon, aren't I? That, yeah. Say where Spengler talks about all this music and all this architecture and all this art will, Will no, no longer exist because the minds that participated in the civilization, obviously I'm paraphrasing, that participated in the civilization that gave rise to it all will simply no longer exist. We will be so different that we will not be able to see these things for what they are or hear these things for what they are. And you already see this. You see people walking through the most remarkable cities, you know, the great cities of the west, with people wandering through Florence, people wandering through Budapest or wherever, and they're all kind of stuck on their screens and everyone has become blind to the world around them. But what Spengler's, I think really getting at at a deeper level is that things exist through a process of initiation. You have to be inducted into those things. And if that process of initiation is eradicated, then whatever you might have been initiated into, even if that thing is still existent, is actually closed off from you. Yes, the pyramids still exist, but unlike Pythagoras, I cannot go to Egypt now and be initiated into whatever that great mystery cult was that gave rise to that amazing thing. And my worry is that whatever this living thing called Britain once was has become a sort of great museum. And actually that path of initiation and induction is becoming more and more difficult to locate and to give yourself to.
- [30:12]
B
Yes, I Suppose part of my hope and my optimism is in the sense of that there is possibility for recovery. It's going to take a lot, and it's probably going to be very unpleasant, whether it involves economic collapse, technological collapse, or some sort of violent overthrow or whatever. I mean, who knows? Maybe all of these things, right? It feels like we're heading towards perhaps a kind of confrontation in the decline and in the kind of mismanagement, deliberate mismanagement of the country, the alienation of the population itself from its own history and the importation of many people who don't share our culture. And all of these things, I mean, very obviously are encouraging all kinds of tensions. But I suppose it's a kind of hope and a sort of idea of what. What are we fighting to preserve, right? What is it for? Right. And. And even a museum keeps things, albeit in a hidden way. I, you know, perhaps their power is hidden for a while, but that they're all still there, right? That there's. Okay, things are being eroded, things are being destroyed, but we can rebuild things, we can tidy up, we can resurrect the churches, we can, you know, do you know what I mean? So I think it's. It's a. It's difficult. I can see all of the tensions and all of the ways in which those things are under siege permanently, and the people themselves are often in despair. You know, there's a lot of nihilism, a lot of absence of hope that's been inculcated, and it's partly coming from inside as well. And so it's a difficult question about how we. What mood we're in, in a sense, right, to think about what it would mean to kind of save Britain or to repair Britain, to restore Britain, wherever we want to talk about it, and, you know, perhaps to sort of finish up. I mean, in a lot of your work, you've. You've tried to draw upon a kind of mystical and magical Christian tradition, right, which you see in. In various parts of Christianity, particularly in the Catholic tradition. And a lot of it is coming through nature, understood as kind of God's creation or an emanation of which we are indeed a part. And we should absolutely acknowledge that we are part of God's creation, part of nature, and that we have different natures. You know, men and women have different natures. Also, a strangely difficult thing have said in the past decade or so longer, and I'm wondering if there's a way in which this enchantment or this magical understanding of creation, when we go to The English countryside. When we go for a walk in a forest, is there not a sense in which that's all still there? I suppose, is what I mean. We have these encounters still.
- [33:00]
A
Yes, well, I agree. And part of my work has been to encourage traditional outdoorsmanship and hunting and cheating and the things I've gained so much from over the years. The, the. But if. I suppose my point is that if all of those places where the, the magic of the universe is disclosed gets covered in solar panels and all of our chalk streams get, as they are now, so polluted that they're toxic to drink in or swim in or fish, you know, that gaining firearms become so complex that no one can go out and hunt their own wild food. The trail hunting gets banned. So this great ancestral pastime, you know, scent hounds, were introduced to this country, the ancestor of the Talbot hound, by the Romans. So hunting with hounds in this country has been going on for 2,000 years. So it's almost kind of, of, you know, it's almost apocalyptic to think that it could be stamped out in the next few months if all of these ways of participation by which even just momentarily, we break out of the whole mechanistic technological spreadsheet paradigm and suddenly encounter the fact that actually we live in this living world. This, this world that is, that is, like Tolkien puts it at the beginning of the Silmarillion, you know, in his. Creation account, you know, the whole universe is like music unfolding out of the mind of God. If all of the ways by which we discover that are being desecrated and snuffed out, then actually we will be completely absorbed into the modern project and there'll be no way out. And this is my great fear. And this is why we have to realize that the ecological crisis. Conservative minded people are very worried about talking about the ecological crisis because they think the whole debate has been framed by the acolytes of Gret Thunberg and the World Economic Forum or whatever. But that's not what we should mean when we're talking about the ecological crisis. We're talking about the fact that our entire landscape now is either covered in foreign topsoil because we've used so many herbicides and fungicides and pesticides and God knows what on the soil, that traditional farming methods are actually punished by the government, that our chalk streams are now so pollute and the water companies across Britain are totally unchecked. The rate of habitat destruction is astonishing. In the last 80 years, 50% of our woodlands and forests have just disappeared because of the attacks on the shooting industry, moorland the size of Birmingham disappears every year. Right. It's astonishing what's happening. Actually. Greta Thunberg and her admirers and all of the people who are in that paradigm couldn't care less about any of that. That's what I mean by the ecological crisis. And so I think it's absolutely imperative that traditionally minded people recapture that entire discussion, frame the debate on their terms. Which is not about environmentalism, that is about genuine tradition based conservationism. And those who share my religious commitments see this as a holy endeavor, as a sacred endeavor. That the great original mission that humankind is given in scriptural revelation is to tend the garden, is to be great stewards. And that commandment was never abrogated. There is still an obligation on us to be great stewards of the natural world. And I think traditionally minded people and Christians need to rediscover that. That's an essential part of their Voltenshaung, to use a pompous term
- [37:58]
B
like worldview or something like this.
- [37:59]
A
Worldview.
- [38:00]
B
Okay, thank you very much for coming in Sebastian.
- [38:04]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [38:05]
B
That's it for this week. Thank you very much for watching. Please like, comment and subscribe and we'll see you again soon.
- [38:11]
C
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